#LiveYourDemocracy

Bigots are Enemies of Democracy

When Donald Trump used the racist trope of recommending his critics leave the country, insinuating that four Democratic members of the House of Representatives are not Americans due to their race and ethnic origin, he declared his fundamental hatred for democracy. He sent a signal that he aligns with hate-based terror groups that have waged war against the United States since the 1830s.

“Know-Nothing” extremists, whose rallying cry was that recent immigrants should “go back to where they came from” burned Catholic churches, killed people in the streets, and menaced innocent Americans through the 1830s and 1840s. When their terrorism was rejected, they formed secret militia groups like the Ku Klux Klan.

They favored the defense of slavery to permit their racist fellow travelers to rape, torture, and murder with impunity. They sought the creation of a terror state. They supported the Fugitive Slave Act, which effectively nullified the Bill of Rights in all of the United States, giving authoritarian rule over any person and any community to slave owners.

There is no possible way to dispute the now obvious fact that Donald Trump is a bigot.

What needs to be recognized now is that bigots are enemies of democracy, and the President has declared his fundamental unwillingness to honor the universal rights the United States Constitution exists to protect. Trump has made evident he cannot serve lawfully in any public office, and his use of the office of the Presidency is a form of deliberate criminal sabotage of American self-government.

Trump has attempted to ban all Muslims from entering the United States. This bigoted obsession of his is a direct assault on the First Amendment to the US Constitution. It is a direct assault on the individual liberties of every American.

He has caged innocent asylum seekers — people fleeing violence and persecution who have an absolutely protected right to request protection from the United States and our system of laws. Our laws put the rights of the most vulnerable above the powers of the highest office. He has deliberately divided families, illegally jailed children, denied their right to counsel and medical attention, and subjected babies, toddlers, and pregnant women to conditions described as “torture” by investigators.

He now claims (falsely) the power to limit the right to seek asylum. The American promise of asylum to the persecuted is an act in defense of human liberty. Donald Trump’s craven attack on the rights of asylum seekers is a direct declaration of opposition to democracy itself. It is an attempt to establish the unacceptable and unlawful precedent whereby a President can strip specific people or specific groups of all protection under the law.

The Fourteenth Amendment, thankfully, makes clear that can never be allowed. Such critical clarifications about the universality of human rights were required, because adherents to the perverse racist worldview expressed by Donald Trump waged a terrorist war against the United States and our democratic system of self-government. They waged that terrorist war in order to defend a system that allowed torture, persecution and murder with impunity.

Bigots are enemies of democracy. All bigoted motivations entering into any public official’s use of public office constitute unlawful uses of public office.

All orders supporting Donald Trump’s bigoted effort to strip human beings of their rights are illegal orders. All efforts to carry out those orders are criminal acts. There is no statute of limitations on crimes against the Constitution. Any person who follows these illegal orders will be subject to prosecution for the rest of their lives.

If you hold public office, you have an obligation — to the United States Constitution, to all who have sacrificed to defend American democracy, to all people living in the United States, to history, and to future generations — to refuse to cooperate in any way with Donald Trump’s campaign of hate and sabotage against American democracy and universal rights.